Susan Breen

Like Heart, the photograph Dogwood Bracts has a connection in part to certain aspects of Susan Breen's domestic life. “The walkway to our 200-year-old home in Connecticut is made of slate,” says Breen. “I walk over it during the course of the day and am always struck not only by its stark beauty, but from the vantage of looking down at it, by the perfect and random arrangement of the things that fall and gather on it through the various seasons. Looking down and flattening the plane, it creates a kind of canvas, a natural and random composition of fallen leaves, sticks, dirt, snow. I’ve begun photographing them - in this case, the random gathering of the bracts from a Kousa dogwood in the crack of the slate. I enjoy the chance in what just happens in nature, and documenting it as it lies on the stone.” Susan Breen grew up in the early 1970s in Buffalo, New York. “I have early memories of drawing in chalk on our slate walkway with my family,” says Breen. “It was something my own father had done at his childhood home growing up, and it was something he shared with me. And though I’d never previously connected it to my own artistic process as an adult, it seems very connected to my life right now, both present and past.” Breen began as a photographer but painting has been her primary medium most of her artistic life. Once she shifted more fully into using paint, her earliest works made use of her own photographs as a collaged ground for oil paintings. Subsequent paintings made reference to camera obscura, and others that followed were drawn in part from old sepia prints she would find discarded in antique shops by strangers. “Although oil paint is still my favored medium, as a new mother I had to temporarily put it aside because of its toxicity, especially with my studio being in my home,” says the artist. “In order to keep working as much as possible, and not have major interruptions in my artistic practice, I began branching out to work with other safer mediums, and ones that would be more flexible, that I could take with me, and do whenever or wherever I had the time, space, energy. This ended up being primarily in the form of both drawing and a return to photography.” # # # # #